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“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

audiosciencereview.com

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Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#101

Post by stordoff »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #48
NoPicklez wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logitech make good products, their speakers have always been quite good IMO. I'll never forget in high school a buddy and I had two of the same Logitech X-540 speakers. We plugged the speakers together and pumped it through effectively a 10.2 setup.

I've been having terrible luck with Logitech, and decided to never buy from them again. An $80 speaker set's audio input jack broke, and Logitech absolutely refused to fix it or help me in any way since it was a month or so past the one year warranty. I live right down the street from Logitech and could have just driven out to their HQ, but they completely stonewalled me.

FWIW, I've had the opposite experience with Logitech for mice:

2010: replaced a ~18-month-old MX400 with an MX620 under warranty after the left mouse button became unreliable (without proof of purchase)

2013: replaced that MX620 with an MX705 after I asked if it was possible to buy a replacement wireless receiver (part of the USB connecter had broken off IIRC) - I had assumed it would be well out of warranty as the original purchase was back in 2008.

I can't say if the difference is because I'm in Europe, they've changed their practices more recently, or it's just luck of the draw.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#102

Post by tradewinds »

pedalpete wrote: post #62

Any thoughts on how you would price a HaaS product. Would you aim for 30% of LTV? I've been looking at Whoop, and I think they have a great business model. Based on my estimates, the COG of their product is probably $8-12. The monthly cost is $35 - but you have to subscribe for a minimum of 12 months so $420.

I think you're looking for a business/economics hybrid field called "unit economics". Its all about churn, customer acquisition cost, etc. There's a guy who works for Microsoft named Tren Griffin who tweets case studies of this stuff - might find it interesting.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#103

Post by rr808 »

m463 wrote: post #18

What I'd like as a consumer is the antidote to this. I saw something like this trying to get a replacement plumbing fitting at my parent's house a few years back. The local hardware store with the high-quality stuff had been closed down by the big-box stores. Perusing the possibilities at lowes and home depot showed plastic and fake chrome when I would have paid extra for high quality brass or even metal. It was just…

Amazon and other high volume low margin retailers are a is pretty good antidote "for this". Good shipped from manufacturer to consumer with smallest markup possible. Of course it kills service, local shopping, city taxes, retail employment along the way but that was the overhead.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#104

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #86
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

> There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. There's a lot wrong with this, but not in a moral sense. For all his faults, Elon Musk made a good point about the space industry near the beginning of SpaceX. He asked a team of "rocket scientists" how much a rocket cost. They said something like $100M. Then he asked them to sum up the material costs. Sheetmetal, tubing, rivets, etc…

[deleted]

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#105

Post by rr808 »

distantsounds wrote: post #47
yalogin wrote: post #14

This post answered the one question that I couldn’t find answer for many years, that is why he did Dr.Dre get into the beats business or the other way why would the founders include Dr.Dre Now I understand that the equipment manufacturing is already commoditized and so the onus is fully on marketing and so he provides a great value.

Watch the documentary "The Defiant Ones" it goes into great detail about the story between Dre and Apple.

This was a great show. I had great respect for Dre when everyone said he should bring out a shoe and he said he wore the same shoes every day, headphones though...

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#106

Post by gregsadetsky »

bane wrote: post #54
mschuster91 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> random FCC compliance stuff Nothing better than designing a product and actually producing a batch of it... and then finding out you have some EMI problem requiring a redesign. If you're lucky, you can remedy it by manually adding some shielding tape, if not... you might as well file for bankruptcy in the worst case.

Ancient history, but the way Apple skirted around FCC regulations for the Apple II while Atari got bogged down in expensive remediations for their 400/800 systems that added to the BOM is an interesting business study.

Fascinating and didn't know about this, thanks!

This goes into the Apple/Atari/FCC story a bit (search for FCC):

https://www.fastcompany.com/90432140/how-atari-took-on-apple...

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#107

Post by butterNaN »

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #78
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

yeah the person who suggests that COGs (or even BOM) should be more than 30% of MSRP cannot be taken seriously on any other business-related statements. That is shows a gross misunderstanding of the fundamentals of unit economics and electronics business models.

Just to be clear for the people reading the comments only, the author of this article is not that person.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#108

Post by analog31 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #57

I built my own speakers for under $200 and I honestly think they are some of the best I've ever heard for a personal setup. They were inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k (Tech Ingredients) . I built the speakers from foam board, the subwoofer from car audio parts and the amp is a standard class D amp. The best part is whenever someone comments on how good my speakers sound I can say I built them m…

I've dabbled in this area too, both for home audio and musical instrument use. The thing I like about building my own is that I know exactly what I'm getting. I can either do my own analysis to my heart's content (of course at my own risk) or plug into the DIY community. Some of the design articles I've come across indicate that there are some very serious hobbyists out there, with interest in understanding both theory and measurements. And no marketing hype.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#109

Post by idontwantthis »

> Most Chinese factories and engineers are perfectly capable of producing high-end equipment... but their customers don't ask for it

You can also get cheap and really good Chinese gear now. I bought KZ-ZS10 Pro IEMs for $45 on Ali Express and they are fantastic. Very clear sound and isolation that beats my Sony XM4 around ears. Unfortunately the bluetooth adapter you can buy for them is static-y garbage.

Re: “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

#110

Post by tuatoru »

jiggawatts wrote: post #86
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65

> The cost of building a consumer audio product is generally no more than 30% of retail. 30% COGS (cost of goods sold) is virtually a maximum for items sold at mainstream retailers. There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. The cost of goods sold is only a fraction of the costs that go into getting products all the way into the customers’ hands and supporting them (customer su…

> There’s nothing wrong with this. These are standard ratios, not some dirty secret. There's a lot wrong with this, but not in a moral sense. For all his faults, Elon Musk made a good point about the space industry near the beginning of SpaceX. He asked a team of "rocket scientists" how much a rocket cost. They said something like $100M. Then he asked them to sum up the material costs. Sheetmetal, tubing, rivets, etc…

> ... how much a rocket cost....

The "rocket" example is as silly as the "Moore's Law applied to vehicles" arguments that used to crop up on Slashdot decades ago.

"If cars improved according to Moore's law, they'd get XXXX miles per gallon and go YYYY miles per hour". Yes, and they'd also be smaller than matchboxes while seating thousands of people.

Exceptional situations are exceptional. Good on Elon Musk for realising that there was a large latent demand for launch-to-orbit services. Well done, that chap. But you can't generalize from that to everything else. Or anything else, really.[1]

With respect to the rest of your argument, I understood that Amazon makes most of its profit from AWS, while stories about its ruthless exploitation of its warehouse staff are legion. Those factoids don't square with your argument that Amazon is making excess profits.

1. Take luxury yachts for example, which are about as expensive as rockets. The bill of materials would be a slightly larger fraction of the final cost than for rockets, but the same reasoning would seem to apply. Why has no-one "Musked" luxury yachts?

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